Friday, August 11, 2017

Staunton, August 11 – In an
interview to the Kazakh-language newspaper Zhas
Alash that is certain to raise hackles in Moscow, Erden Kazhybek, the
director of Kazakhstan’s Institute of Linguistics, says that his country is
doing away with the notion of “Russian” schools and promoting English to lessen
the country’s dependence on Russian sources.

But that doesn’t
mean that those studying in schools where Russian or Chinese remains the language
of instruction won’t be affected by Latinization, Kazhybek says. The government
plans to require that students in them study certain subjects in Kazakh and
thus in the Latin script.

Kazakhstan must “stop dividing
schools of the country by language” as it has done since Soviet times. Instead,
and the government has agreed, from this fall there will be only “Kazakh
schools,” even if there is “deepened instruction” in one of the foreign
languages be it Russian, Chinese, or English.

“There should not be a term ‘Russian
school’” any longer, the scholar says, because “in Russia there are no Russian
schools just as there are no English schools in England or Chinese in China.
All schools of Kazakhstan must be Kazakh schools.”

Doing otherwise is “an archaism,” a
survival of the past. “Today, the Kazakh language is not only the language of
the Kazakh nation: it is the language of the entire state. And likewise, Kazakh
culture is the achievement not only of the Kazakh people but the culture of
this state. It is time to recognize that we are the state-forming nation.”

At present, he says, Kazakhstan is
promoting instruction in English above all. The reason is simple: “90 percent
of the information coming to us via Russia is simply a translation from
English. And why shouldn’t we get it from the original source? We are thus introducing
English in order to reduce the influence of Russian.”

“We lose nothing from this; on the
contrary, we gain a broader access to advanced information and new
technologies,” Kazhybek says.